LinguisticMANIPULATIVE

Apophasis (Paralipsis)

What it is

Raising a charge by professing not to raise it — “I will not mention my opponent's drinking” — so the accusation is planted, the audience registers it, and the speaker keeps deniability about having made it.

How it works

Apophasis, paralipsis, praeteritio, occultatio: four names for one maneuver — stating something by declaring that you will not state it. The Rhetorica ad Herennium recommends it for charges that would look ungracious if pressed directly. The mechanism is the separation of content from commitment. The accusation is fully present in the sentence — the audience hears “drinking” — but the speaker has asserted only a refusal to discuss it, so the claim enters memory without ever having been made in a form that could be challenged, sourced, or retracted. It exploits what Daniel Wegner and colleagues called incrimination through innuendo: in their 1981 experiments a headline denying a charge (“Bob Talbert Not Linked With Mafia”) lowered readers' opinion of the person nearly as much as an assertion of it, because a charge must be represented to be understood and the denial does not erase the representation. Paralipsis also performs restraint — the speaker seems to be sparing the opponent — while the implied claim gets the benefit of insinuation, which audiences treat as something known but unsayable rather than something unproven. There is a benign cousin, genuine omission for brevity (“I pass over the procedural history”), which names a topic without importing a charge. The tell: if the thing not mentioned is an accusation, the mention was the point.

Real-world examples

  • •Cicero's first speech against Catiline (63 BCE) announces that he passes over the ruin of Catiline's fortunes — in the course of describing it.
  • •Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act III, scene 2) tells the crowd he has Caesar's will but must not read it, and that he fears he wrongs “the honourable men whose daggers have stabbed Caesar” — each disclaimer delivers the charge it disclaims.
  • •Donald Trump in a January 2016 tweet: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct.” The refusal was the insult, and everyone received it.
  • •Workplace: “I am not going to bring up the fact that the last project she led slipped by two months” brings it up, and the speaker can later say they never criticized her.
  • •Online: “Not saying he is a scammer, just saying it is interesting how many people got burned” — the same structure, with “just saying” as the deniability clause.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●If you are not going to make the charge, do not name it; if you are, make it in a form that can be answered and sourced.
  • ●Genuine omission for brevity names a topic, not an accusation. “I will not review the procedural history” is fine; “I will not review the ethics complaints” is not.
  • ●Treat “I am not saying X” as if you had said X, because you have; take responsibility for it or delete it.
  • ●Do not use the figure to keep deniability about a smear; the deniability is the manipulation, not a mitigation of it.

How to defend against it

  • ►Convert the insinuation into a claim and ask for it to be owned: “You have just said X while saying you would not. Are you asserting X? On what evidence?”
  • ►Refuse to argue the content until the assertion is made: the speaker gets either to make the claim and defend it or to withdraw it — not to leave it in the air.
  • ►Name the device where the audience can hear it: “That is paralipsis — raising a charge by pretending not to. Notice that no evidence was offered, because no claim was officially made.”
  • ►In writing, quote the sentence back with the disclaimer removed. “Not saying he is a scammer” reads, without the frame, as “he is a scammer,” and the author can be asked to stand behind that.
  • ►Keep a record: when the speaker later says “I never said that,” the sentence in which they said it while not saying it is the answer.

References

  1. Anonymous, formerly attributed to Cicero (trans. H. Caplan) (-86). Rhetorica ad Herennium (Book IV). Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1954
    Occultatio: the figure of asserting while professing to pass over.
  2. Lanham, R. A. (1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed.). University of California Press
    Definitions of paralipsis, apophasis, praeteritio, and occultatio.
  3. Wegner, D. M., Wenzlaff, R., Kerker, R. M., & Beattie, A. E. (1981). Incrimination through Innuendo: Can Media Questions Become Public Answers?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(5), 822-832
    Denials and questions carrying a charge damage reputation nearly as much as direct assertions.
  4. Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How Mental Systems Believe. American Psychologist, 46(2), 107-119
    Comprehending a proposition involves initially accepting it; rejection is a separate, effortful step.
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